Abstract: This article seeks to open a discursive space in which to reflect on issues of Holocaust historiography arising from emerging research on personal archives collected by “ordinary” people in relation to the Holocaust. The explorations, intended as a discussion piece, are anchored in a specific context, namely that of the Dorrith Sim Collection (DMSC) which is held in the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre (SJAC) in Glasgow. This collection offers a focus to concretize the historiographical discussion in a largely un-researched collection, while enabling consideration of a range of related collections and publications. The article investigates the historiographical practices of those involved in the collection, preservation, presentation, and publication processes, and considers the inherent ethical choices, choices that highlight the agency of the family, the archivist, and the scholar. Ethical choices, here, the investment of specific meanings and claims to significance, are amplified in this context because of their connection to genocide. I suggest that a “transparent historiography” that accounts for the research process within the published narrative could address the challenges arising from the necessity to be selective about what to collect, preserve, and write about, and how to do so. I borrow from other fields of research and professional practice to highlight possible avenues along which to advance historiographical discussion.
Abstract: Eine Vielzahl von Institutionen und Initiativen in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz sammelt, erforscht und vermittelt jüdische Geschichte und Kultur. Dazu gehören Museen, Bibliotheken und Archive, Gedenkstätten, Vereine, Kommissionen, Universitätsinstitute und private Initiativen; es gibt Projekte zur Erforschung jüdischer Friedhöfe ebenso wie genealogische Gesellschaften. Sie sind lokal, regional sowie überregional tätig und werden durch staatliche Förderung oder privates Engagement getragen.
Das Buch bietet erstmals eine aktuelle Bestandsaufnahme dieser Institutionen und Initiativen, die mitunter auf eine lange Tradition zurückblicken können, insbesondere in den letzten drei Jahrzehnten aber an Zahl zugenommen und Bedeutung gewonnen haben. In diesem übersichtlichen Nachschlagewerk beschreiben die einzelnen Institutionen ihre Entstehung, Entwicklung und Aufgaben. Genaue Angaben zu den Archiv- und Sammlungsbeständen ermöglichen Interessierten einen Zugang zu schriftlichen, bildlichen und materiellen Überlieferungen zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur im deutschsprachigen Raum.
Abstract: Although digitization has become a word that is almost synonymous with democratization and citizen participation, many museums and other cultural heritage institutions have found it difficult to live up to this political vision of inclusivity and access for all. In Sweden, political ambitions to digitize the cultural heritage sector are high. Yet, institutions still struggle to reconcile their previous practices with new technologies and ethical guidelines for collecting and curating material. In this article we identify, analyse, and try to find resolutions for the current gap that exists between cultural heritage practice and government policy on digitization, open access, and research ethics. By examining two Swedish examples of Holocaust collections that have not been digitized because of internal policies of secrecy and confidentiality, we attempt to demonstrate how discourses about vulnerability affect the ways in which certain archival practices resist policies of accessibility and ethical research. In order to unpack the discourses on vulnerability, Carol Bacchi’s post-structural approach to policy analysis has been used together with Judith Butler’s theories on vulnerability and resistance. In addition to understanding how cultural heritage institutions in Sweden have protected some of their collections and how this has obstructed efforts to make these collections more accessible, we also offer some suggestions on how these issues can be resolved by reimagining digitization as transformation.
Abstract: During World War II, Bosnia and Hercegovina was occupied by the Ustashe-led Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi collaborator par excellence. Ustashe, mostly Croats, Muslims-Bosniaks, and domestic Germans, overwhelmingly participated in the annihilation of more than 85 % of the Bosnian Jewish population during the Shoah. Beside the physical destruction of the community, these Nazi collaborators plundered Jewish assets in an estimated value of over one billion US dollars and robbed priceless cultural artifacts along with the communal archives. While witness accounts agree that looting of most movable property (books, artwork, and other valuables) was carried out in the first days of occupation by the Nazis themselves, the robbery of Jewish property (apartments, houses, businesses) as well as torture and killings of domestic Jews was committed by the Ustashe. What complicates the restitution in this country is the state and memory politics, but also the inexistence of a central registry of stolen items that could be claimed. Moreover, it is of the essence that the GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) within Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia region engage in conducting detailed provenance research of their respective collections.
Abstract: For many decades, the Holocaust in South-Eastern Europe lacked the required introspection, research and study, and most importantly, access to archives and documentation. Only in recent years and with the significant help of an emerging generation of local scholars, the Holocaust from this region became the focus of many studies.
In 2018, under the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure umbrella, the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania organized a workshop dedicated to Holocaust research, education and remembrance in South-Eastern Europe. The present volume is a natural continuation of the above-mentioned workshop with the aim of introducing the current state of Holocaust research in the region to different categories of scholars in the field of Holocaust studies, to students and—why not—to the general public. Our scope, not an exhaustive one, is to present a historical contextualization using archival resources, to display the variety of recordings of discrimination, destruction and rescue efforts, and to introduce the remembrance initiatives and processes developed in the region in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Abstract: Italy holds most of the world's cultural heritage, and its Jewish cultural heritage is also of the greatest importance. Only after Emancipation did Italian Jews begin to pay attention to their material heritage – synagogues, cemeteries, libraries, archives, silver furnishings, textiles and artifacts. Their preservation came to be understood as a means of preserving the identity and history of the Jews. After the war, and especially since the early 1980s, the importance of preserving the Jewish cultural heritage as a memory not only for Jews, but for the whole country, began to be acknowledged not only by Jews, but also by the general population, including the Italian authorities.
Abstract: The analysis of survivors’ testimonies was unable to enter history-writing for many decades after the shoah. If nevertheless it was, the testimonies served only as illustrations of the personal experience of victims in the Grand Narrative of historians. However, in the past 20 years, parallel to the opening of digital oral history archives, these testimonies became regular sources of mainstream historical research. Moreover, the memory culture of the Shoah has fundamentally changed in the Western world after 1989. From the perspective of paper, the most relevant changes were a widespread appearance of the concept (cultural, social, historical) of trauma in public history, and the digital turn in testimony collections.It is a commonplace in psychological and sociological research on Holocaust testimonies and other ego-documents that in the case of large digital collections specific analytical methods need to be used. However, Holocaust historians dealing with these sources have hardly applied such methods. My paper proposes specific sociological techniques of using personal accounts in history-writing (such as the intuitive analysis of testimonies by accumulating and testing data; qualitative approaches and quantifying the data of big qualitative collections). It also discusses the historical usage of large testimony collections with the help of current case studies of the Holocaust in Hungary
Abstract: This paper specifies and describes the main four stages and strategies of intercultural and memory survival of Sephardic women in Bosnia in the past (during the interwar period) and in the contemporary world (before, during, and after the collapse of Yugoslavia). The first strategy, named here as a (manu)script and orality/textuality one, is illustrated by a study Sephardic Woman in Bosnia (1932) by Jewish Sarajevo feminist Laura Papo Bohoreta (1891–1942). The second one, labeled as a translation and print strategy, is connected with the activity of Muhamed Nezirović (1934–2008), especially his translation of Papo’s book from Ladino into Bosnian (2005). The third one, recognized here as a cultural transfer strategy, is represented by the novels The Scent of Rain in the Balkans (1986) and The Ballad of Bohoreta (2006) by contemporary Serbian female writer Gordana Kuić (1942). And—last but not least—the fourth strategy of digitizing manuscripts and archival texts by Laura Papo is represented by Edina Spahić, Cecilia Prenz Kopušar, and Sejdalija Gušić, a team who prepared and has recently edited three collected books with Papo’s manuscripts (2015–2017
Topics: Jewish Identity, Age and Generational Issues, Artworks, Artefacts, Objects and Materiality, Memory, Main Topic: Other, Attitudes to Jews, Stereotypes, Libraries and Archives, Arts and Culture: Books and Literature
Abstract: Following on the overview presented at the first annual Holocaust and Restitution Conference concerning what is known about the expropriation of cultural property in Serbia during World War II and where that cultural property is presently located, ways in which restitution of art, Judaica, and other cultural property might best be implemented are discussed.
Serbia is encouraged to do historical research on the history of cultural plunder during World War II and on what was restituted to Serbia and within Serbia after the War, and to create a listing or database on the internet of what was taken in Serbia, noting what was subsequently returned and what is still missing. An entity should be responsible for provenance research in the country, either one that actually does the research as in Austria or one that oversees the research carried out by museums, libraries, and archives as in the Netherlands. Information should be made public over the internet of the results of such provenance research. A separate entity, as neutral and independent as possible, should be responsible for restitution decisions based on the provenance research. Serbia should pass legislation covering the return of private movable cultural property that is applicable to both Serbian and foreign citizens. Preferably there should be no deadline for claims for cultural property, whether individual or communal, since such cultural property is often not immediately identifiable. A non-bureaucratic process for filing claims should be established. Cultural property for which original owners and heirs are not identified (heirless property) should be listed on an internet site so that potential claimants can come forward. Such items should not necessarily move from their current location, but their provenance history should be publicly noted.
Abstract: This article is concerned with what happens to precarious community buildings in times of austerity. It responds to a landscape of capitalist realism, in which instrumental, economic forms of value are mobilised to justify the closure of ordinary buildings whose survival is not identified as a political priority. The study focuses on two London cases of a library and an elderly day centre under threat of closure, and traces how grammars of austerity rendered these buildings substitutable. Considering how abstract sociological conceptions of value/s can struggle to break into the embedded common sense of austerity, the authors explore how ethnographic practices of collaboration and attentiveness can help amplify alternative expressions of the meanings of these buildings for their communities. Enacting a form of ethnographic witnessing, which learns from Wittgenstein, the authors highlight the creative, vernacular registers and gestures of library users and day centre members, and show how these were anchored in the buildings themselves. In this way, the article supplements noisier, more hyperbolic accounts of the violence of austerity by amplifying quotidian responses, which express how ordinary buildings and the forms of life they sustain, matter.
Abstract: The Vilnius Jewish Public Library, the first Jewish library in Lithuania since World War II, opened in 2011 thanks to the initiative of Mr. Wyman Brent. His goal was to establish a cultural institution for Jews and Gentiles that would foster compassion, respect, and responsibility for all members of the community. By 2014, the Vilnius Jewish Public Library made significant improvements, especially in the areas of collection development, the management of public relations, and the unification of the local community. However, the library website and its social networks provided very little information about the history of Jewish libraries in Vilna. This paper will explore how to create a bridge between the past and the present for the Jewish Public Library through an exhibition of digitized primary source materials that tells the story of the community built around the Strashun and Ghetto libraries in Vilna. Allowing the primary sources to tell the story of the Vilna Jewish Library’s past makes the Vilnius Jewish Public Library community more versatile, diverse, and not limited by geographic borders.
